Is Coding the New Literacy? | Mother Jones “Maybe that doesn’t seem like a lot, but consider what the city pays to keep it running: $9 a month in hosting costs. “I figured that even if it only led to a few fire hydrants being shoveled out, that could be the difference between life or death in a fire, so it was worth doing,” Michaels-Ober says. And because the CFA team open-sourced the code, meaning they made it freely available for anyone to copy and modify, other cities can adapt it for practically pennies.” tags: coding literacy programming computational thinking computer science socialmedia weekly It turns out that rather than increasing the number of kids who can crank out thousands of lines of JavaScript, we first need to boost the number who understand what code can do. the greatest contribution the young programmers bring isn’t the software they write. It’s the way they think. It’s a principle called “computational thinking,” and knowing all of the Java syntax in the world won’t help if you can’t think of good ways to apply it. depending on who’s defining it . . . probably not computational at all . . . broader than that The Eccentric Genius Whose Time May Have Finally Come (Again) – Doug Hill – The Atlantic “The world of […]

Make Good Art: Neil Gaiman’s Advice on the Creative Life, Adapted by Design Legend Chip Kidd | Brain Pickings “When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician — make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor — make good art. IRS on your trail — make good art. Cat exploded — make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before — make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and that doesn’t even matter. Do what only you can do best: Make good art. Make it on the bad days, make it on the good days, too. “ tags: weekly art ds106 advice neil Stalin was their drug: Tractor Drivers (1939) | Obskura “Tractor Drivers is a musical film. I simply love the fact that even the musical genre, always defined by escapism it offered to audiences, in the Soviet Union served propaganda purposes. If musical numbers in Hollywood musicals were usually just spectacular disruptions of storyline meant to entertain, in the Soviet musical they were ideological interludes, used to remind the viewer about his duties as a Soviet citizen. This crazy […]

Specialists – Futility Closet “microbiohydrogeochemist: one who studies small flora and their relationship to underlying rock strata by using chemical methods and SCUBA equipment biohydromicrogeochemist: a very small geochemist who studies the effect of plant life in hydrology “ tags: specialists words stems roots weekly english collision detection: “Wired Love”: A tale of catfishing, OK Cupid, and sexting … from 1880 “It’s all quite nuttily modern. Wired Love anticipates everything we live with in today’s online, Iphoned courtship: Assessing whether someone you’ve met online is what they say they are; the misunderstandings of tone and substance that come from communicating in rapid-fire, conversational bursts of text; or even the fact that you might not really be sure of the gender/nationality/species of the person you’re flirting with. “ tags: weekly telegraphy history english language communication Nineteenth Ward Bank: 1908 | Shorpy Historical Photo Archive “The idea behind the 19th Ward Bank, run by the Provident Loan Society, has been described as “a government-approved pawnshop for the indigent.” “ tags: bank ward nyc 1908 history photograph weekly Creating a False Memory in the Hippocampus Total Recall for mice. Arnold’s nightmares are now becoming possible. “Memories can be unreliable. We created a false memory in mice by optogenetically manipulating memory engram–bearing cells in the hippocampus. Dentate gyrus (DG) or CA1 neurons activated by […]